Sparkle is a virtual worlds (VW) client for the iPhone that allows the user to login and communicate via instant messages with friends, and via proximity chat with avatars that are in the same location. Sorry, you probably need to try a VW like Second Life to understand what that’s about and why it is an exciting development. For now, please just accept that being able to connect to Second Life and interact live with others there even when you can’t log in normally is a big deal. For instance, I’ll be able to attend meetings from my iPhone and see what is being said in chat even if I don’t have my computer set up or if I’m in an internet café without my laptop.

Besides Second Life, Sparkle will connect to other grids as well, such as OSGrid or Second Life’s beta grid. Right now, those three are the only VWs available, but I’m sure others will be added as demand warrants. It’s possible to set up any number of accounts for various grids, limited only by the number of avatars you have. In fact, you can even sign up for a new account via Sparkle! Select the approprite service, fill in your account username and password, and there you go.

Choose the account you want to login with from the resulting list, click the “Go!” button, and your friends list appears on the next screen, with those online indicated with highlighted stars beside their names, while offline avatars are shown with dimmed stars. To send an IM to one, you select the name, then click the “IM” button on the next screen. A window with the virtual keyboard appears, and you proceed to communicate.

It seems pretty simple, and it is easy to use, but the implications are really awesome. The only real gripe I have about it is the requirement to use WiFi, but there is probably no way around that. Second Life in particular probably needs more bandwidth than the plain old cellular signal can provide. As it is, people who have very long friends lists (like me) have reported long waits to log in. Genkii’s tech support is working on it, and in fact I’ve had better luck logging in with my main account lately, after the first few attempts when it took several long minutes.

Sparkle IM gets a high rating from me. I’ve been waiting for someone to publish an iPhone app for connecting to Second Life, and this is a good one that works. Thanks, Genkii!

As it happens, I left a MICA meeting to talk to Henrik, and we had just been discussing many of the same things there, although on a more concrete basis. While Henrik was interested in general concepts, the MICA group is actively working on establishing one or more servers using different VW platforms, to use for developing their astrophysics simulations in 3D. One simulation that has already been done using OpenSim software is documented in this YouTube video:

The developers of this Newtonian n-body simulation, a group in Japan called Genkii, are now working with MICA. Adam Johnson and Jeff Ames are members of the Tokyo Genkii group, and are also OpenSim developers.

Tonight yet another group I’m involved with, the ISM planning group in Second Life, will be discussing yet more aspects of the same things, how to expand our virtual museum into the growing (someday to be) interconnected metaverse.

So, all the research I’ve been documenting in this blog is starting to have some results in the real world … uh, I mean, virtual world. (It’s more and more difficult to tell the difference between them these days.)

Last time I wrote, I was downloading the OpenSim server software to my external hard disk via SVN. That went well, but I have to admit that the instructions for compiling and running it on MacOS 1.5 were so daunting that I deferred that until after I’d tried out the binary under WindowsXP.

It worked! I installed and ran the binary version of the open source server on WinXP, which was installed on a virtual machine running in Parallels Desktop for Mac on my early 2006 20″ Intel Core Duo iMac, and while I couldn’t do much except look around with the camera tools (since I had not configured any of the other servers — asset, inventory and avatar databases), it was quite a thrill to know that I could have my own little world running on even a laptop unconnected to the internet if I wished. (The reason I use an external disk for my virtual machines is so I can access them using my husband’s 17″ MacBook Pro or any other Mac with Parallels Desktop installed.) I logged in using a copy of the SecondLife viewer, just editing the target definition in the shortcut’s general properties window, and using the default login ID and password of “Test User” and “Password”. The target I specified in Properties, of course, was the localhost URI, http://127.0.0.1 plus the designated port, in this case “:9000″.

Other VW Developments

In an already-running OpenSim grid (OpenLife), a week or two ago I met the person who started that system, Sakai OpenLife (OL name). It was interesting chatting with him, and he gave me a tip I’ve followed up on for porting content among VWs. He said many people have had good luck with Second Inventory, an application that creates a backup on your own hard disk of objects, textures, bodyparts, etc. as long as you have full permissions for those assets. I discovered that there is a multi-avatar version available, so while it’s a bit pricey (29 Euros, vs 14 Euros for the single-avatar version), I went ahead and bought it. It does indeed work as promised, although it is a bit slow to copy a large inventory since the “folder copy” function isn’t yet enabled and items must be backed up and restored one at a time. Folder actions are promised for the next version, though.

I ran a few tests, and I was able to back up and “restore” copies of simple and linked objects from both my primary and alt accounts in SecondLife to accounts in Open Life and OS Grid. It isn’t perfect; embedded scripts don’t always make it, and when they do they must be recompiled since not all LSL functions are available in the OpenSim VWs yet, and animations also don’t seem to come across when embedded in an object. Presumably those might be uploaded and added to objects if one has the .bvh files for them, though. My coffee mugs came through with their handles and “coffee” intact and didn’t require relinking, but the “drink” animation and script aren’t there, and the little “ring” piece used for the rim of the cup wasn’t linked. I just threw away the rings since they aren’t critical, and copied the particle steam script I used in SL, recompiled it and added it to the “steam” prim, but I haven’t done anything about the animation yet.

Interestingly, once I had the backups made, I could restore inventory items from my SL alt account as well as my main account to either SecondLife or another VW with impunity. The owner’s name didn’t make any difference to the software. When an asset is “restored” to an inventory, whether it came from that account or not, the owners name becomes that of the account that it’s being restored to, not the source inventory owner’s. There is certainly some potential for mischief here, especially since I was also able to “back up” some full-permission assets that I did not create, and when they were restored my avatar’s name showed up as the creator.

Copyrights and DMCA Issues

The ability to “rebrand” items that I owned full permission copies of, but had not created, made me wonder what the attitude of some of the content creators in SecondLife were toward these brave new virtual worlds. Would I be able to legally use copies of fulll-perms textures I’d bought in SecondLife in other worlds? I sent that question to one of the texture store owners I’ve patronized extensively, LilyBeth Filth, owner of Textures-R-Us. Predictably, she said, “No.” Here’s a direct quote from her IM, which I think explains her reasoning and the problem very well:

Hi, Our User License does not allow customers to use them in any other virtual world including SL open source clients. The reason for this is because they would be uploaded in your name and not that of the creator. In time people will share these textures with friends (as they always have) and before we know it people are selling work created by the original artist but uploaded by other people and it creates a nightmare of a DMCA issue. We create & sell textures for SL only. Sorry. LillyBeth 2008/5/17

So, it sounds like there could well be a whole new round of rights issues to hash out, even when the dream of a mostly seamless metaverse becomes a reality. The technology is not the only thing that needs to be mastered.

That was discouraging. The Wonderland software is available for Mac OS, but only up to version 10.4, and I’m running 10.5. Maybe I can compile the source code for 10.5, since Apple claims “Leopard can compile and run all your existing UNIX code”, but I’m not quite ready to do that just now.

However, a day or two after the Wonderland test I was reading the documentation for OpenSim when I saw that they offer a Subversion (SVN) download for MacOS X, and mentioned that OS X 10.5 (Leopard) has SVN pre-installed. So, what the heck, I pulled up a Terminal window to verify that yes, SVN is there, and keyed in the command to download OpenSim. It worked like a charm, although I should probably have done it on my external hard disk so I can play with it on Phil’s laptop while we’re driving tomorrow. Maybe I’ll do that anyway. It’s about 68 MB, which is smaller than I expected. It would certainly be fun to have my own region available to play in while we’re traveling and not online!

My own efforts toward implementing a home VW server have been progressing, but slowly. Wonderland is installed on my OpenSUSE VM after finally getting Java6 JDK to work properly, but I haven’t been able to get them to talk to each other yet. I suspect I need to roll back Java to the earlier release (update 5 instead of 6), since some dependencies seem to have fallen off the edge with the later one. I remember seeing a note about that in the Wonderland site a few weeks ago, but had forgotten in the excitement of finally finding the link to the JDK software. Sun does not make it easy to find things on their website, mainly because they offer so much that deciding exactly what it is you need can be very confusing for the uninitiated. I do have the older release downloaded, so I’ll try installing and running with that next.

One of the things people have been clamoring for in SecondLife for as long as I can remember (back to about July 2005, when I first rezzed into that world) is “Web on a Prim”. A prim is a primitive object, like a representation of a 3D cube or sphere or cylinder. These are the building blocks out of which all the incredible representations of physical objects are made in 3D virtual worlds. By combining them, twisting and resizing them, “painting” them with textures, linking them together and embedding little scripts in them, all the wonders of the grid are made manifest.

All, that is, except for a functioning Web browser that an avatar can share with others in the world. The latest version of the SecondLife viewer, the client software that enables one to enter these virtual worlds, offers at last a rudimentary Web viewer, but it can only display a single page with no live links. Hypertext without hyperlinks is almost useless, but of course it is a step in the right direction, and better than anything that preceeded it.

In one of the derivative VWs I’ve joined recently, though, they have taken LSL a step further. As well as implementing most of the commands from that scripting language, a few home-grown functions are added. One specifically enlarges the ability to display Web pages on primative objects, chosen by anyone in the world, not just someone who has control of the media on the land parcel where the object exists as is presently the case in SecondLife. For the geeks among us (you know who you are), this function is called osSetDynamicTextureURL() and it allows a “voice” command to be used to surf to any given URL. Where native Linden LSL commands follow the convention of having their names preceeded by “ll” (two lower-case letter Ls), as in llSetText(), the OpenSim scripters have used os[Function name] to identify those that are not from Linden Lab. I’ve tried out an object that uses a script with this function, and it works quite well. However, when I tried to make my own Web display object using a copy of the script I found in the user’s forum on the OSGrid.org website, it did not work; I don’t know why. Perhaps the copy has a typo I’m not proficient enough to spot, or maybe the grid was just being a bit unstable at that moment. It is still alpha software, after all.

Still, even if I couldn’t make my own Web display (yet!), the fact that LSL is being extended in OpenSim grids is very encouraging.

Also encouraging is the fact that I heard from a friend tonight that a mutual acquaintance is also planning to install Sun Microsystem’s open source Darkstar server to run a Project Wonderland region on his own computer, as I hope to do soon. This is becoming the favorite indoor sport of the really extreme VW addicts on the block! I’m one step closer now, since I finally located the package I need to install Java6 SDK on Debian Linux, a requirement for running Darkstar.

Sure enough, one can buy a whole region (equivalent to a SecondLife sim, or 16 virtual acres, 256 meters square) for just USD $90 for the first month, and $75 per month thereafter. That’s compared to Linden Lab’s new low price of USD $1000 set up and $195 per month land use fees. Of course, not much is working in OpenLife yet, and there are almost no residents, but I got so enthusiastic at the thought of a viable alternative world that I went ahead and signed up to become a “Foundation Resident” — one who owns a region in the first wave of land sales. My region is called “Queenstown”.

The text on the sign in front of the big ISM logo block reads:

This land was purchased on behalf of the International Spaceflight Museum R&D expeditionary force.

The International Spaceflight Museum (ISM) was created in Second Life in September 2005.

For information, IM Kat Lemieux in either Open Life or Second Life

But first, I should tell you how I got into the world. User accounts are free, just as in SecondLife. The client application in the OpenLife website is for Windows only. I did boot up my WinXP virtual machine, and dutifully downloaded their client, but I couldn’t get it to run. However, when I went looking for help I discovered a page in their wiki that described how to use the Second Life client by adding a single line to a file in the “Resources” folder in the Mac OS X application’s contents. It worked like a charm. It’s just as easy to do this on Windows or Linux by adding the same target definition to the application’s shortcut or (in Linux) command line.

However, while rummaging around in the OpenLife website, I found information about the OpenSim Standalone server code. This software does require Windows, though, and while one can set up a sim or a region of up to 4 sims using it on your own server, at present this cannot be connected to the OpenLife grid. What is more, according to one of the residents I met in the world, the plans to enable linking a server to this grid are far, far down the road.

While I was in the world, playing with my new region, I met someone who is also a member of the Association of Virtual Worlds. When I went to the association’s website to add him to my friends list there, I joined a new group on that site about Central Grid, which is described as “… a virtual world platform where recreational and business users create 3D communities or grids which are all interconnected.” Naturally, I had to try that one out, too, and see what was there. I instantly was overcome with buyer’s remorse over my OpenLife (OL) region purchase, since Central Grid appears to be much further down the development road than OL. However, their prices are rather higher than OL, although still far less than Second Life. Central Grid also uses the SecondLife client, with a one-line change to define the target definition, just like OpenLife. The only difference is the URI. Maybe I didn’t make such a gross mistake after all.

But I wasn’t through. From there I went to the OpenSim website, where I discovered a page that lists several more open source projects based on the OpenSim server. OpenLife is listed there, but Central Grid is not. However, another VW, OSGrid, looked very intriguing because according to its description, “Sims are all owned by individuals, companies, universities and are connected at no charge. [except the plazas, which are community regions]“. So, I made yet another copy of the SecondLife client, changed the line in the target definition, and went to have a look. I was impressed! This may be the place where I recommend the ISM put our efforts once we figure out how to create a Standalone sim. In the meantime, we can play in Queenstown to see what we will be up against when we try to recreate some of the ISM in another VW.

it occurs to me, though, that since all these worlds are based on the same code, and eventually all of them say they will allow 3rd party servers to connect to their grids, maybe we can just use one server for them all? Or perhaps it would be necessary to have a copy for each grid, but the group could do its work in one Standalone iteration, and the administrator could copy it to connect to the other grids on a regular basis, or better yet define a cron job to do it, in effect creating mirror sites. This might be the way all these grids are eventually connected to one another.

Someone speculated that in future your personal inventory would be saved to your own hard disk rather than being in a central asset database, thus allowing you to carry all your “stuff” from world to world. Being a person who tends to log in from different computers, I would hope that instead we would find some data grid in the cloud to store our things, so we aren’t tethered to a single machine. Since the inability of Linden Lab’s asset database to keep up with demand seems to be one of the major problems with scaling Second Life, maybe this would be just as difficult for an open source community to manage, but maybe it would be planned out in advance better for all the OpenSim based grids, since now we have a better idea of what the metaverse probably is going to look like for the immediate future than Linden Lab knew when they were designing their system.

One can hope that we will be able to learn from Linden’s experience, even as we take their open sourced code to go beyond the SecondLife world. However, given the unfinished state of all these worlds and the limited number of people using them, I think we (the ISM) will be in SecondLife for a long time to come, even if we experiment with additional virtual locations.